The Second Joyful Mystery
by Qoheleth
Summary: The second in a projected series of 20. In which J'onn J'onzz is flung back in time and witnesses the Visitation.


**Disclaimer:** All the following characters are either historical personages or the property of DC Comics. I own none of them.

**Author's Note:** This story takes its cues as much from the Justice League comics as from the cartoon, and, although I did try to reconcile the two as best I could, there may still be some elements here that were not foreshadowed on TV. (For instance, I understand that Bruce Timm did his very best to ignore J'onn's Martian super-strength, to which I make a passing reference near the end of this story.) If this offends against any purist sensibilities you may have, I apologize and urge you to find another story.

* * *

"J'onn J'onzz recording," said the massive figure silhouetted against the Watchtower window. "A full rotation of the Earth has elapsed without noticeable danger to this facility. Under ordinary circumstances, I would now turn over guard duty to the Flash, but in light of this evening's total eclipse of the moon and the effect it may have on certain types of criminal psychology, I feel there is a need for greater security than he is able to provide. I therefore intend to remain on guard duty until the danger period has passed."

As the Martian Manhunter spoke these words and turned off the recording device, out of the corner of his eye he saw the League transporter sparkle and a shadow fall across the floor of the room. "That may be your intention, Manhunter," he said, "but I'm afraid you won't be able to fulfill it."

J'onn whirled around and laid his eyes fully on the withered, clock-bedecked figure stepping from the transporter. "Chronos?" he exclaimed wonderingly.

The Time Thief bowed ironically. "In the flesh," he said.

"Impossible!" said J'onn. "You have been officially dead for over ten years!"

"Years, Manhunter?" Chronos sneered. "The years themselves are my ally!"

He said no more, but J'onn J'onzz was a full telepath, and trained to enter into the minds of his enemies and extract information from them as fully and as quickly as he could. He did so now, and the knowledge he derived from Chronos's mind told him more than all of that madman's boasting ever could have.

He learned that Chronos's particles had been floating aimlessly in the time-stream for over a hundred billion years, and that, at a point not far distant from Omega, they had happened to all return to within 1500 cubic seconds of each other. Their temporal inertia had drawn them together, and the Thief of Time had been reborn.

He learned that Chronos had taken advantage of the radically changed physical nature of the universe in which he had found himself to construct an awesome weapon: a hand-held device he called the Kairos Beam, which flung any person on whom it was turned across time and space at mind-boggling velocities, yet left him fully conscious even as his body was torn apart by the strain.

He learned that Chronos planned to use this device on every member of the Justice League, beginning with the one who happened to be directly in front of him at that moment.

And he learned, as Chronos pulled out a purple, glowing rod and trained its beam on him, that he would not be able to prevent him from doing so.

As he crashed through the Watchtower window and sailed out into the vacuum beyond, his telepathic mind still felt the madman's glee.

* * *

A certain reference text, in standard use throughout the galaxy, states that an average humanoid can survive in the vacuum of space for about thirty seconds on a lungful of air. For Martians, who have greater lung capacity and don't require as much oxygen, the average is somewhat higher: on the order of a minute and a quarter.

Since J'onn J'onzz was still alive when he hit the Earth's atmosphere some 10,000 miles from the Watchtower, it may be safely presumed that he was going very fast indeed.

The first thing he observed as he approached the Earth (if the disjointed thoughts that flashed through his mind can be called observations) was that it was much darker than usual. Granted that he was facing the night-side of the planet, one would still have expected to see the lightscapes of major metropolitan centers. There were none. It was as if the entire population of Earth had decided to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

If J'onn had had time to reflect on this, he would have concluded, correctly, that the Kairos Beam had flung him backward in time rather than forward – a fact that he could have verified by observing that the Earth was spinning deasil relative to the North Pole, rather than widdershins. He was, however, distracted almost instantly by a second observation: His body, like all other objects that enter the Earth's atmosphere at very high speeds, was susceptible to the effects of extreme friction with the air. To speak plainly, he was catching fire.

His first impulse was to despair. At the speed at which he was traveling, he was uncertain that he could survive a head-on collision with the Earth even with all his powers intact; in the presence of fire, his situation was surely hopeless, and in his mind he prepared himself for death.

In the next moment, however, his mind was turned clean round. Rather than weakening his powers, the fire appeared to actually be strengthening them; his senses seemed sharper than ever before, and he felt untold strength surging through his muscles.

There was no time to question this, no time to ponder. There was only time to make a single choice: _Given this circumstance, shall I attempt to survive?_

J'onn made his choice – and, approximately 2.2 seconds later, a mountain valley in southwestern Asia was covered with a thin layer of fluid Martian tissue.

* * *

As J'onn gathered his body back into its normal shape, he took stock of the countryside in which he had landed. The sight was a pleasant one: a rugged, hilly landscape strewn with small farms and orchards, in which almond and olive trees waved languorously in the warm breeze; it was perhaps the most tranquil sight J'onn had ever encountered.

After a moment, he realized why. On the Earth he knew, even the most peaceful scene was accompanied by an undercurrent of mechanical noise, which grated on his Martian sensibility and made real tranquility impossible. That was not the case here: although J'onn's hearing was about three times more acute than that of the most sensitive human ear, he was unable to hear anything that resembled a motor. This observation was corroborated by the taste of the air, which was astonishingly pure and fresh, as if it had never felt the taint of fossil-fuel emissions.

"Of course!" he murmured to himself. "The blast must have sent me backwards in time – which would explain my atypical reaction to the flames that were kindled during my fall. The reversal of my personal time-flow also reversed the usual reactions of my body, so that, instead of weakening my powers, the fire strengthened them – which was doubtless how I was able to reduce my body density quickly enough to survive the impact with the ground."

He glanced at the sun to determine its movement. It was traveling toward what his directional sense told him was the western side of the sky, indicating that he was moving in a past-to-future direction once again.

"Probably the effect of the Kairos Beam ceased once I stopped moving," he reflected. "It would have been interesting to see myself in the last instant before my impact: was there one me spread out on the ground, and another me just about to collide with it?"

This thought barely had time to cross his mind, however, before a more pressing one took its place. This area was clearly inhabited (the orchards testified to that), and it seemed highly unlikely that none of the inhabitants would have felt the shock wave that must have occurred when he hit the ground. It would not be long, therefore, before someone came out to investigate the cause of the disturbance – and it would never do for that person to come face-to-face with a six-foot, green humanoid.

Hastily, he changed into his standard human form and began to walk away from the scene of the impact, but he had only gotten a few feet when a figure came over the rise.

It was a female, and bearing young; she had reached the point where that was obvious. It was also rather remarkable, since J'onn estimated her age in the early fifties: young by many species' standards, but well beyond the standard child-bearing age for a human.

He reached into her mind and examined her linguistic faculties. Her sole tongue was something that she knew as Aramit; it was not a language J'onn was familiar with, but it seemed to be a member of the Hamito-Semitic family, which gave J'onn a rough idea of his current location.

Hastily, he absorbed as much of the language as he could in two minutes, detaching from the woman's mind as soon as she was close enough to make out his features.

"Peace, lady," he said in the local idiom, raising a hand in greeting.

"Peace, sir," replied the woman, whose name was Elisheva. "Tell me, did you see something fall out of the sky a few moments ago?"

"No," said J'onn, truthfully; he had been far too intimately involved to see much of anything.

"Green?" Elisheva said. "About the size of a man?"

J'onn shook his head.

"Oh." Elisheva frowned, and glanced around vaguely. Suddenly, her eyes trained on the ground just behind J'onn's feet. "What is that?"

With a sinking feeling, J'onn realized what she was looking at. His body had been very nearly a liquid when he hit the ground – but even a liquid, traveling at 480,000 miles per hour, will make a crater when it strikes the ground, and a crater the size and shape of a large man is a striking thing indeed.

"What is what?" he said, glancing behind him. As he did so, he reached into Elisheva's mind once more and set up a mental block in her visual centers, so that when she looked directly at his impression in the soil, she would see only smooth ground. It was not something he was entirely comfortable doing, but it was the only way he knew to keep her from learning certain facts that a woman of her time had no business knowing.

Elisheva stared at the patch of ground where, only seconds before, she had been sure she saw a human silhouette. "Nothing," she said uncertainly. "For a moment, I thought I saw… but clearly I didn't."

She frowned, shaking her head, and J'onn felt a sudden pang of guilt. He had scarcely known this woman for three minutes, and already he had meddled with her mind twice. True, it had been an emergency in both cases, but the fact was still there, and it did not sit will with J'onn's Martian ethical code.

In a half-hearted attempt to soothe his conscience, he enquired of the lady her name, even though he already knew it from his first foray into her mind.

"Elisheva, the daughter of Aaron," she said. "And you?"

"My name is Jochnan," said J'onn, selecting the closest Aramit approximation of his Martian name. "The son of…" He hesitated, thinking of his father's uniquely untransliterable given name. "Eliphaz," he finished at length, although he felt that this was not quite satisfactory.

Elisheva seemed uncommonly delighted with his answer. "Indeed?" she said. "My son is to be named Jochnan, also."

The reply, _Yes, I know,_ was on the tip of J'onn's tongue, but he managed in time to suppress it and replace it with, "How do you know it will be a son?"

"On the best authority possible," said Elisheva. "An angel of God told my husband that it would be so."

J'onn, who had expected some typically mammalian response about how "a woman always knows", was so thoroughly taken aback by this statement that it was some moments before he was able to respond, "Indeed?"

"Yes," said Elisheva. "He was burning the incense in the Temple area – my husband is a priest, you know, Zechariah the son of Abihu – when one of the seven Angels of the Presence appeared by the side of the altar and told him that his prayer had been answered, and that we would soon have a son, whom we were to name Jochnan."

"Ah," said J'onn faintly. "One of the seven Angels of the Presence, you say?"

Elisheva nodded. "The one called Gabriel," he said, "who appeared to the prophet Daniel and elucidated the visions of the end days to him. You remember?"

"Of course," said J'onn. In fact, his knowledge of the prophet Daniel, and of Earthly religious history generally, amounted to precisely nothing, but to say so would have provoked numerous awkward queries about how he happened to speak Aramit so well without being acquainted with the religious history of its speakers. It seemed better, therefore, simply to accept unquestioningly such information as he was given, and imply knowledge of the rest.

"In any case," he said, "it is scarcely usual, I believe, for an Angel of the Presence to concern himself with the conception of a human child. You and your husband have received a remarkable honor."

Elisheva shrugged humbly. "Our son is to be a remarkable man," he said. "The angel told Zechariah that he should bring back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God, ushering in his advent in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah. He will unite the hearts of all, the fathers with the children, and teach the disobedient the wisdom that makes men just, preparing for the Lord a people fit to receive him."

"Impressive," J'onn commented politely.

Elisheva did not reply, and J'onn perceived that her thoughts were no longer with him. He therefore withdrew from her circle of consciousness, and gave himself up to his own thoughts.

There was no question that it was an extraordinary story she had told. There was also no question that she believed every word of it. The question in J'onn's mind was whether he was to believe it himself.

Another man might perhaps have dismissed the story, no matter how firmly the woman believed it, on the grounds that "such things do not happen". J'onn did not have that alternative. He himself was a walking demonstration that far more improbable things did in fact happen, as were most of his comrades in the League. On the face of it, therefore, he ought to have been readier than anyone to accept the surety of this by-no-means-credulous woman as convincing evidence of the verity of her claim – and he could not quite understand the reluctance that he found in himself to do so. It was as though something in his mind passionately desired him to disbelieve in Gabriel's appearance to Zechariah the priest, and was urging him, without logic but with remarkable fervor, to do so.

This was a disturbing reflection for the great telepath, and to distract himself from it he turned his attention to the mind of the unborn Jochnan. In Martian etiquette, it was considered more acceptable to gratuitously probe the minds of infants or embryos than to do the same to those of adults (not because infants and embryos were considered less worthy of respect, but because they had less desire to keep secrets), and J'onn had frequently found participation in the simple emotions of the very young to be a soothing exercise. It was in the hope of being so soothed that he now touched the mind of Jochnan the son of Zechariah.

He broke off contact two seconds later, severely shaken. In forty-two years as Earth's foremost mind reader, he had never come up against anything like the mind in Elisheva's womb.

It was not that Jochnan's emotions had not been simple. They had, indeed, been of an almost stunning simplicity. However, when J'onn had thought of embryos' emotions as "simple", he had unconsciously assumed that "simple" meant mild, unemphatic, limited for the most part to the awareness of comfort, nourishment, and warmth. That was not the case with Jochnan.

What was the case with Jochnan, J'onn couldn't precisely say. It seemed that the embryonic human somehow participated in all the sensory perceptions of his mother: he saw the sunrise that greeted her in the morning, he heard the birdsong that struck her ears, he felt the breeze that blew on her face. Only, when Elisheva perceived these things, it was with the limited, unemphatic perception of the ordinary human; when Jochnan perceived them, it was with the violent intensity of one who was born to listen, to hear, and to speak of what he heard in a voice of thunder. Touching his mind, even in its half-formed and barely-conscious state, was like passing through a curtain of lightning; J'onn could only imagine what sort of man would grow from such beginnings.

_The spirit and power of the prophet Elijah…_ J'onn had never touched the mind of the prophet Elijah (whoever he might have been), but he saw no reason to doubt that, if a man were born to receive messages from the Creator of the Universe, his mind would have been precisely what Jochnan's was. Not even the devil's advocate in J'onn's mind cared to dispute that point.

As he pondered these things, he became aware that Elisheva was addressing him. "I beg your pardon?" he said. "Forgive me, I wasn't listening."

"I invited you in," said Elisheva. "This is our home – my husband's and mine."

J'onn looked up and saw, to his mild surprise, that they had arrived in front of a small basalt dwelling. A passage of writing was hung over the doorway; it was in Aramit characters, but evidently not in the Aramit language, as J'onn found it wholly meaningless when sounded out.

J'onn was about to thank his companion for the invitation and follow her inside when his pyrenepheric sense perceived the presence inside the dwelling of a large brick oven and several oil-fed lamps. He drew up short, realizing that any attempt to enter a house so furnished would instantly deprive him of his disguise, and that Zechariah and Elisheva presumably had all of the pre-industrial peasant's usual mistrust of wandering strangers who turn out to be enormous, green man-like creatures with red, pupil-less eyes.

"I thank you for your kindness," he said, "but I would prefer to remain out here for the time being."

An offended look passed over Elisheva's face, and it occurred to J'onn that the culture in which she lived might have set more store by hospitality than did twentieth-century America. She said nothing, however, but merely nodded and entered the house alone.

J'onn turned himself about and gazed out on the undulating landscape before him. Physically, it held the same limited appeal for him that a planet's landscapes always hold for the natives of other worlds, but the sense of tranquility that he had felt when he had first taken stock of the place was not only as strong as ever, but seemed to have distinctly increased; indeed, one might have fancied that it had become almost palpable.

At first, J'onn attributed this to the presence of the local farmers, whose minds (as he thought) were so thoroughly at peace with the universe and their place in it that their contentment and gladness cast its color over all the landscape, as the sun lightens entire hemispheres by its radiance. Only gradually did he realize that this theory did not accord with the facts; the local farmers were not, in truth, unusually contented with their lots in life, and, in fact, when their minds were closely examined, one of the prevailing sentiments therein seemed to be a smoldering resentment of the foreign empire that apparently controlled their homeland at the moment.

This raised the question, in J'onn's mind, of how he had managed so thoroughly to misconstrue the tenor of their thoughts, and he searched about himself for an answer. It was not that he had simply projected the glow of contentment from his own comfort in the pre-industrial world; he was a sufficiently accomplished empath to know the difference between a projection of his own and the unobscured emotions of others. The coloring of inner peace and joy in living that tinted the entire countryside had a real existence of its own; the question was from whence it derived that existence.

The answer, when it came, left the Martian Manhunter dumb with wonder. He had thought, upon first surveying the landscape, of a sun of gladness illuminating the countryside, but it was only now that he realized how accurate a metaphor that had been. Just as sunlight comes from a single source, and by the brightness of that source is cast upon millions of acres, so the feeling of joyous tranquility that seemed to J'onn to blanket the entire countryside was due to the presence of a single young woman who was making her way up the hill to Zechariah and Elisheva's dwelling-place.

Like Elisheva, this woman – Miriam was her name – bore a child. There, in J'onn's eyes, the similarity ended. Elisheva was well stricken in years; Miriam was barely out of girlhood. Elisheva was a cautious woman, slow to accept the face value of a thing; Miriam seemed to have no capacity for skepticism. Most striking of all, Elisheva was a typical human female, with all the usual frailties, struggles, regrets, and other psychic baggage common to sentient life everywhere, while Miriam's mind was so pure, so radiantly untroubled, that she seemed to J'onn to possess no taint of worry or regret whatsoever. Which was ridiculous, of course; every sentient mind in the universe, even Superman's, was tainted in some degree by the fear of doing wrong and the memory of wrongdoing – but J'onn was burned if he could find either of those sentiments in Miriam.

It must be admitted, however, that he was not looking quite as closely as he might have. It was hard for him to focus on anything other than the mind of Miriam's unborn son.

J'onn's immediate impulse was to say that this was not a human mind at all, but that, he realized, was incorrect. The mind in Miriam's womb was certainly human (indeed, one would not have been wrong in calling it supremely human), but it was inextricably bound to something else, something that was far more unhuman than J'onn himself. It seemed to J'onn that this other thing, in its own way, was also a mind, but he could not be sure, for it gave no sign of its existence to his senses; he could only deduce its nature from the embryonic mind's awareness of being in perfect harmony with something so enormously glorious that, were it to be made truly present to a mortal mind, that mind would instantly cease to exist under the crushing weight of its splendor.

As to the embryonic mind itself, what could be said? It was a human mind as human minds were meant to be; it was what every sentient being strove for, and wept because it could not achieve. To touch it was a joy, and a terror; one rejoiced in its glory, and cowered before its radiance; it lightened one's heart to know that such things were, and it filled one with sorrow to realize that one was not such a thing oneself. It reminded J'onn of a title he had once seen in a science-fiction bookstore: _The Stars Are Also Fire_.

_Yes,_ J'onn thought. _This child is a star – perhaps he is the Sun itself – but he is fire, all the same._

And as he pondered this, Miriam crossed over a nearby ridge and entered the courtyard of Elisheva's dwelling, and J'onn perceived her visually for the first time. For a moment, he was startled, not because Miriam's appearance was in any way striking, but precisely because it was not; apart from a slight resemblance to Elisheva, suggesting a distant family relation of some sort, there seemed to be nothing remarkable about Miriam's exterior whatsoever. It seemed almost shocking to J'onn that two such minds as he had just been contemplating should be contained in so ordinary a body.

Then he reflected that when he had selected a form for John Jones, he had not made him any more glamorous than this young woman, even though beneath the private detective's unassuming exterior was concealed as extraordinary a being as any on Earth. Perhaps a similar idea had been in Ma'aleldi'il's mind when He had crafted this vessel of glory. In any case, it was not for him to offer criticisms.

Now Miriam was approaching the door of Elisheva's dwelling, and for some reason J'onn felt a great desire to observe her as she went in to speak with her relative. He therefore shed his human disguise, discorporated his body to the point where it was no longer visible to human eyes, and crept as close as he dared to the dwelling, reaching the doorway just as Miriam entered and called out, "Peace, sister Elisheva!"

And at that simple greeting, J'onn felt a piercing stab of joy shoot through the room. It took him a moment to realize that it came from the infant Jochnan, for his telepathic sense had been temporarily dazzled, and he seemed to see all four of the minds inside the small basalt dwelling as somehow joined, their individual variations not eliminated, but rendered irrelevant by a deeper and more fundamental unity. Thus, it almost seemed to be Jochnan, as much as Elisheva, whom J'onn heard say to Miriam, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. How have I deserved to be thus visited by the mother of my Lord? Why, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ear, the child in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you for your believing; the message that was brought to you from the Lord shall be fulfilled."

And when Miriam responded, she seemed to be speaking with the spirit of her own unborn son when she said, "My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit has found joy in God my Savior, because he has looked graciously upon the lowliness of his handmaid. Behold, from this day forward all generations will count me blessed, because he who is mighty, he whose name is holy, has wrought for me his wonders.

"He has mercy upon those who fear him, from generation to generation; he has done valiantly with the strength of his arm, driving the proud astray in the conceit of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed. He has protected his servant Israel, keeping his merciful design in remembrance, according to the promise which he made to our forefathers, Abraham and his posterity for evermore."

There was silence for the space of perhaps half a minute; then the mystic vision faded, and the two women began to speak of more quotidian matters. J'onn was recalled to himself, and he noted with amusement that he had re-solidified himself without realizing it. He resumed his human form and walked slowly away from the house, reflecting that Elisheva the daughter of Levi would have more pressing matters to attend to than a strange man who refused to enter her house.

* * *

As he stood a few minutes later staring out across the countryside from the top of a nearby hill, he noticed a strange disturbance in the air around him, as though it was being displaced and then replaced almost instantaneously. A human would not have been able to detect it, and even most Martians wouldn't have known what it was, but J'onn had become quite familiar with the phenomenon during his tenure in the League – although what it was doing here, in the ancient Middle East, he had no idea.

"Flash?" he whispered.

The vibration shimmered, then slowed down to the point where the naked eye could discern a tall young man in a skintight red outfit. "Well, _there_ you are, M.M.!" said the Fastest Man Alive. "Where the heck have you been? I've been practically to the Carboniferous period and back looking for you!"

"What?" said J'onn, puzzled. Then his eye alighted on the Kairos Beam in the Flash's hands, and he realized. "Ah," he said. "Chronos has been neutralized, then?"

"You know it, big guy," said the Flash. "Superman and Wonder Woman managed to take him out while he was breaking into the Batcave; then Batman figured out a way to tie his little toy here to the Speed Force, and ever since then I've been running through time looking for you and Green Lantern."

"I see," said J'onn.

"Though when GL got flung into the eighth millennium," the Flash added, "he at least had the sense to turn on his signaling device, so I'd be able to find him when I got to the right year. I don't know what you've been doing, out here in the middle of nowhere."

J'onn shrugged. "Observing," he said. "Pondering. Gaining in wisdom. It can be a very profitable way to spend time; you should try it someday."

"Yeah, whatever," said the Flash. "You could have made it a little easier for me, anyway."

J'onn smiled. "Oh, I knew you would find me eventually," he said. "He who is mighty, you know, has mercy upon those who fear him, from generation to generation."

The Flash blinked. "What?"

J'onn sighed. "Never mind," he said. "I take it, then, that it is time to return to our own century."

"Pretty much," said the Flash. "Unless you wanted to do some sightseeing of the Roman Empire first."

J'onn shook his head. "No," he said, "I think I have seen all that I need to see."

"Okay, then," said the Flash, "just climb up onto my back, and your valiant steed will carry you back to the good old 1900s. And make sure you do that density-reduction trick of yours before you get up; not all of us have Martian super-strength, you know."

J'onn compliantly shed both his human form and most of his mass and hopped onto the Flash's shoulders. The Flash activated the Kairos Beam and began to run, and in the next moment the two superheroes had vanished from mortal ken; the only things remaining on the hilltop were a few wild olive trees, their leaves rippling lightly in the wind off the Sea of Galilee.

* * *

**About the Rosary Sequence:** Twenty mysteries, twenty stories. Each of the stories in this series centers around a character from a different fandom, who is placed, all unawares, in the midst of a different one of the 20 Scriptural or Traditional events that make up the mysteries of the Rosary. (This means, of course, that an alert posted on this story does one no good; the alert has to be on my stories generally. If you don't want to do that, but you do want to follow the Sequence, you can drop me a letter, and I'll notify you personally when the next story goes up.)

**Other stories currently posted:  
**"The First Joyful Mystery" (Giver)


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